War of the Encyclopaedists (7 page)

6

After a morning of remedial land navigation in the woods, Captain Byrd had called for Montauk and the three other lieutenants who led the four platoons in Bravo Company. They stood in Byrd's small trailer while he sat behind his desk, glancing intermittently at his computer screen. His XO was standing behind him.

“I know you've all been wondering where we're headed,” he said, spitting tobacco into a Diet Sprite bottle. “So listen up, but remember, this is need-to-know information, and you baby LTs only marginally need to know, but I'm feeling generous. We're slated to be part of the security force in and around the Green Zone. Bravo Company will be attached to the 3rd Brigade 1st Cavalry Division. Texans. They just arrived to relieve the invasion force. It'll mostly be a static security mission. Can't skip land nav, though, 'cause we might be rolling around pulling convoy security, too. And of course, we have to get to Baghdad from Kuwait.” Captain Byrd handed them each a stapled packet.

“I was thinking about that, sir,” Montauk said. “Here we are walking around the woods holding compasses. Maybe it would be more useful to do some kind of mounted nav course. Even head up north and practice driving in the city?”

“You want to take an armored column up to the U District and pick up college chicks, Montauk?” The other LTs chuckled. “Point taken about mounted land nav,” Byrd went on, “but it's not in the training
schedule, and we're leaving in eighteen days. We'll work with what we have and figure out the rest over there.”

Montauk flipped rapidly through the stapled pages, which contained yesterday's Intelligence Summary for the Area of Operations they were scheduled to inhabit three weeks from today. It was like a teaser trailer for what he and his troops would be dealing with—the confusing kind that didn't reveal the plot of the movie. It was poorly laid out and full of acronyms. “What's AIF stand for again, sir?”

“Anti-Iraqi Forces,” said Byrd.

“I thought that was us,” said LT Miller, getting a few laughs.

“Says they were expecting to get hit with a car bomb on Tuesday,” Montauk said. “Do you know if they got hit, sir?”

“Don't know,” said Captain Byrd, rocking back in his office chair and clicking at his desktop distractedly. He acted like the manager of some start-up company, constantly harried and overworked but somehow content with all the distraction. He couldn't have been over thirty, and he was only two ranks above Montauk, but he seemed so accustomed to leadership, so experienced, that Montauk had trouble remembering that Byrd himself had never been deployed. “It's a good question,” he said. “XO? What's the word on car bombs?”

The executive officer, a first lieutenant and Captain Byrd's second in command, rolled a chair up to an adjacent workstation. “Looks like, yes, one VBIED went off at Checkpoint Eleven in Karada. Blew up a couple of First Infantry Division soldiers. One KIA, one wounded.”

KIA. Montauk had known that acronym before even joining the Army. Whoever that soldier was, on Monday, he'd probably been smoking cigarettes and making dick jokes. Tuesday, dead. And in just three weeks, Montauk and his boys would be manning that very checkpoint. He pictured a burning car, smoke and concrete debris, pieces of a soldier spread across the dirt. Sodium Joh, maybe. Maybe Ant.

“There you have it,” Captain Byrd said, spitting more Copenhagen juice into his Diet Sprite bottle.

• • •

Montauk winged along Fifteenth Avenue on his bicycle. It was a fixed gear he'd picked up on the cheap from Gregg's Greenlake Cycle. The
only parts he'd really spent money on were the wheels, which had flat white carbon fins instead of the usual metal spokes, making for a very cool effect when he started going fast. Her name was Hermione (after Hermes, the speediest Greek god, not after the Harry Potter character), and she weighed less than his loaded M4 carbine, which was named Molly Millions.

He'd gone down to the co-op on Madison to pick up a bottle of wine and a loaf of the locally baked bread that Mani loved. On his way back, he zipped past storefronts on either side: 22 Doors, the tapas bar, the little vegan grocery, the barbershop with the spinning candy-cane pole where the dude kept
Playboy
s in the stack of magazines and tried to talk to you about NASCAR as he cut your hair. The Hopvine, a teahouse, and two indie coffee joints. Several kids in bright green Kerry shirts were out front, prodding people to register to vote. The sky was darkening quickly as the sun fell behind a blanket of clouds.

He hopped off Hermione and carried her up the stairs to the Encyclopad just as the clouds let out a light drizzle upon the Emerald City. A few of his housemates were watching an old kung fu movie in the living room. He found Mani in the kitchen, tending to a pan of sizzling bacon.

“Goddamn, that smells good. What is it about bacon?” he asked.

“Fat makes everything better.” She was off her crutches now, but she wore a leg brace. She was padding across the floor with a small block of Asiago, her ass moving unevenly under a stretchy minidress.

He set the wine bottle down on the counter and poked her with the loaf of bread as she grated a pile of the salty white cheese on a plate. “What'd you do today?” he asked.

“Read a little bit. Did some more sketching.”

“Didn't go out. Again.”

“Gotta problem with that?”

“You seem to be doing all right.”

“And it's wet out.”

“Only as of a minute ago.”

“What did
you
do today?”

“I found out where we're going,” Montauk said, regretting the words even as they passed his lips.

“Oh my God, where?”

“I can't, actually.”

“Come on.”

“No, I'm serious, it's classified. It's no big deal. I mean, it's interesting, but it's not shocking or anything. It's a place in Iraq, and we'll basically be doing security stuff, which we already knew.”

“Why's it classified, then?” She bagged up the cheese and returned it to the fridge. Montauk leaned on the counter and watched her walk. He felt an urge to carry her upstairs and pull that dress off. “ 'Cause if I tell you, you'll tell Al-Qaeda, then they'll know there are Americans coming to Iraq, and the whole plan will be shot.”

“You won't get shot,” Mani said.

“The
plan
will be shot.” Montauk smiled at her.

But Mani couldn't laugh. What if something did happen to him? Even scarier was that he didn't seem worried at all. At worst, he was a dead man walking. At best, a lost boy. Was he right not to worry? It was all so confusing. She slumped and smiled back at him, chiding herself for her dramatic imagination—it was perverse in a way, like attending a stranger's funeral to stare at the faces of the grieving, feeding off the aesthetic energy of tragedy.

“God. I really want to know where you're going now,” she said.

In his head, Montauk was saying, Sorry babe, and giving her a hug and a kiss as if she were his girlfriend. “Loose lips sink ships,” he said. He watched her lips part, revealing a slight gap between her front teeth. It was now or never. He could step forward and kiss her. One swift, soft motion. Right now.

He stood rooted to the spot, and the three feet of kitchen air between them quickly grew stale. Mani gave her hair a flip and turned the bacon.

7

The sun was out and shafts of light filled the room through the open bay windows. A comfortable breeze kept the air circulating. Montauk flipped through his collection of graphic novels while listening to Marvin Gaye. He had sold off most of his belongings in the last three weeks, including his beloved bicycle, Hermione.

Earlier that morning, the spine on his Moleskine had cracked and the pages started falling out. Mani had offered to make him a journal, and though he'd refused at first, she explained that she enjoyed book-binding and collage and would probably be making one anyway just for the fun of it, and plus, he could take it with him to Iraq. She was sitting on the floor now, carefully cutting images out of old magazines and science textbooks with a pair of toenail scissors.

The teakettle in the kitchen began to whistle, and before Mani could get up, Montauk put down his copy of
Watchmen
and attended to it. Though she was walking quite well now, he had gotten used to fetching things for her.

He poured the cup of tea and carefully carried it out to the living room, then set it on the floor next to her. Mani finished guiding the scissors around an image of a bicycle and held it up for his inspection. “What do you think? Too sentimental?”

“No,” Montauk said. “I like it.”

• • •

The day passed slowly until they found themselves, post-dinner, post–several glasses of wine, watching Terry Gilliam's
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Montauk had never seen it and they'd rented it on Mani's suggestion. The numerous housemates, even those who had joined them for dinner, had vanished to the sanctity of their rooms or the revelry of the bars down the street.
The Encyclopad was dark and quiet as they settled into the film.

It began with the baron interrupting a play about his life to correct its inaccuracies. But the baron's own incredible account of his past exploits—told in flashback—was cut short. The city was under attack, and to save it, he set off in a hot-air balloon woven from ladies' knickers. In search of his heroic friends, he visited the moon, the center of the earth, the belly of a whale.

But for every astonishing sequence, there was a boring interlude. With each lull, Mani had nuzzled farther into Montauk until her head was resting snugly in the crevice between his chest and arm. During the King of the Moon sequence, she had fallen asleep, and during the rest of the film, she had slowly become more and more horizontal, rotating into him, facing away from the television, until her chest was pressed against his. As the film neared its end, jumping between meta-levels of narration, Montauk felt the kind of intellectual dizziness he got when thinking about logic paradoxes, a dizziness that complemented his incipient erection. Perhaps it was that this evening—watching the film, Mani slowly sliding closer to him—had become its own incredible story, a story all the more arresting because he could never tell it to Corderoy.

The credits rolled to a loud fanfare and Mani awoke. She leaned back slowly. Montauk looked directly at her, then leaned in and kissed her. She rose slightly, adding pressure to the soft brush of his lips, and they sampled the private tastes of each other's mouths.

Montauk pulled back. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Don't be.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to kiss me again?”

Montauk had fallen to half-staff. The anticipation, the richness of possibility they'd been cradling for weeks, was collapsing in the wake of that kiss. “I don't know,” he said.

“Are you worried about Hal?”

Yes, Corderoy would hate him, at least for a while. But it was more than that. Maybe he was tired of relationships, even purely physical ones, based on convenience? Maybe their relationship was a house on stilts and sex would push them off it and into the usual mire. “I just like what we have,” he said. “That's all.”

“Me, too.”

“What are you going to do when I leave? Have you thought about it more?”

“I'll figure something out.”

“One of my guys, Fields. He knocked his girlfriend up.”

“Okay . . .”

“He's getting married,” Montauk said.

Mani drew back an inch, her eyes betraying the sort of prescient alertness pets have just before earthquakes.

“What if . . . I don't know.” What was he saying? Well, he knew what he was saying, but why the fuck was he saying it?

“Spit it out,” Mani said.

Montauk bit his lip. “We could get married,” he said.

Mani sighed and stared at him as if he were a puppy that had just shit all over the floor.

“Not, like, with a ceremony, just at the courthouse,” he said. “It wouldn't mean— Things would be the same. The Army pays out a Basic Allowance for Housing—and if I have a spouse, it's a thousand more. You could have that. Free money. You could use it to pay off your hospital bills or whatever. You don't want to, that's fine, but then nobody will benefit from that money. Except for some overall military budget that—”

“Shut up, Mickey.”

Montauk left his mouth ajar, as if those stupid, stupid words might funnel back in like chimney swifts.

“I don't want your pity. You don't owe me anything. Neither does Hal.”

“I know.”

“So you promise this has nothing to do with that?”

“Promise,” Montauk said. He was lying.

“Even so, we couldn't tell Hal. You know that.”

“I won't tell him if you won't.” As soon as he said the words, he knew he
meant them, and it made him feel ashamed that he was planning to keep something so huge from his friend. His best friend? Perhaps not anymore.

Mani stared at him long enough that Montauk became conscious of the DVD menu music playing in the background. He couldn't hear his own breath, because he wasn't breathing. Then she leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek. “I'm sorry,” Mani said. “I can't.”

Montauk swallowed his own head. “No,” he said. “You can. You have to. I mean, I want you to. Let me do this for you.” He felt an excitement fueled by the thought that it might very well be a terrible idea, an excitement made more urgent by the guilt of hiding it from Corderoy, guilt complicated by the fact that he'd done Corderoy's dirty work of kicking Mani out in the first place. It was so confusing that somehow this blind leap felt like the only sensible option.

Mani considered his face as if it were a room-sized Rothko. “I don't have to,” she said. “I don't.”

Montauk closed his eyes for a moment. “No,” he said. “You don't. You don't have to.”

Mani took a deep breath. What would it mean to say yes? Allowing herself to be supported, yet again, by a guy? Not just a guy but a soldier, sending money home. It was such a weirdly romantic gesture, especially since it seemed pretty clear they weren't headed toward a sexual relationship. It would mean something for him, too, if she agreed. It would probably be the biggest decision either of them had made in their lives. Maybe it was the perfect fertilizer for a strong friendship. She didn't have one of those right now. Not anyone close, really close. Hadn't in a while. But that could change, so easily. “Why not?” she said.

“Why not?”

“Yeah. Consider me Mrs. Montauk.”

Whoa. Shit. Really? That was it, then. They were engaged. “We're engaged,” he said wondrously.

“Shut up,” Mani said, and she punched him on the shoulder.

Montauk couldn't help smiling. He'd have to tell his mother. No, of course not. That would only sow confusion. And yet a part of him indulged in what felt like nostalgia, nostalgia for future events that would never happen: he and Mani picking out wedding invitations, scouting locations, sampling dinner wines, licking envelopes, writing vows.